Barbara Gibbons, 79, Writer of ‘Slim Gourmet’ Cookbooks, Dies

Barbara Gibbons, the author of “The Slim Gourmet” syndicated column and cookbooks — and the original 208-pound customer for their low-calorie recipes — died on March 26 at her home in Dallas. She was 79.

She had been ill for several years, her daughter, the Rev. Susan Gibbons Gillespie, said in confirming the death.

Ms. Gibbons, who began writing food columns for Family Circle magazine in 1971, was syndicated as “The Slim Gourmet” in about 200 newspapers nationwide by 1976, when she published her first book, “The Slim Gourmet Cookbook.”

The book reflected her many years of scouting and testing low-calorie recipes for waistline-busters like macaroni-and-cheese, chicken à la king, pizza, pancakes, chocolate pudding cake and what she called “man-pleasing beef stew.”

Ms. Gibbons’s interest in low-calorie food began with her personal weight problem. Never thin, she was tipping the bathroom scale at 208 pounds while she was raising her daughter and working full time as a writer and photographer for The Union Leader in New Jersey in the 1950s.

Determined to lose weight but loath to give up comfort foods, she wrote, she began substituting ingredients and reducing fat content: using skim milk instead of whole, spray oil instead of cooking oil, trimming fat and putting food under the broiler instead of in the frying pan.

In the mid-1960s she was down to 128 pounds when she began teaching a course at a local community college about her low-calorie cooking method. She also began writing a weekly cooking column for The Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey, which caught the attention of an editor at Family Circle.

Her monthly Family Circle column, “Creative Low-Calorie Cooking,” ran for many years, continuing even after she began her three-times-a-week “Slim Gourmet” column for United Feature Syndicate, which carried her work from the late 1970s until the early 1990s.

“I’m one of those genetically obese people who struggled and dieted in vain for years,” she said in a 2001 interview. Having landed on a way to “de-calorize” her diet, she added — and as a person of self-described compulsive tendencies, she also allowed — “I simply couldn’t help but become messianic about it.”

Ms. Gibbons wrote 16 books. The International Association of Culinary Professionals awarded her its cookbook-of-the-year Tastemaker Award in 1976 for “The Slim Gourmet Cookbook,” and again in 1978 for “The International Slim Gourmet Cookbook.” She later wrote about international food and culture for travel journals.

She was born Barbara Halloran on Oct. 9, 1934, in East Orange, N.J., the only child of Frank Halloran and the former Marion Whittlesey, both immigrants from Ireland. She dropped out of Montclair State Teachers College (now Montclair State University) in the mid-1950s after becoming pregnant with her daughter, Ms. Gillespie said.

Moving home to live with her parents, she worked as a photographer and writer for local newspapers, eventually established herself and her daughter in an apartment of their own, and married Wilbur Gibbons, a businessman, in 1960. They divorced in 1981.

Besides her daughter, Ms. Gibbons is survived by her longtime companion, Gerald T. Gallagher, and four grandsons. Beginning in the 1990s, she and Mr. Gallagher divided their time between residences in northern Texas and Southern California.

Ms. Gillespie said her mother loved food and was a dedicated cook, but was probably motivated mostly in her career by two other desires. “My mother was driven to be creative,” she said, “and driven to be able to support herself — to be an independent person.”

Correction:

An obituary last Monday about Barbara Gibbons, the author of the “Slim Gourmet” syndicated column and cookbooks, misstated the name of the company that carried her column from the late 1970s until the early 1990s. It is United Feature Syndicate, not United Features Syndicate. (The error also appeared in a picture credit in 2011, in an article in 2010, and in several dozen other articles in past years.)

Reprinted from Sunday’s early
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